Comments Off on Weekly Poll: What Should Apple Change About the Mac App Store?

The Mac App Store has become the default place to find and install apps on your Mac, and for the most part it's been a great boon to OS X. It's made it easier for indie developers to get an app published and noticed, and has made it simpler for new Mac users to find the great Mac apps they've heard about. In OS X Mavericks, it's getting even better, with automatic background update installation and options for subscriptions, say, for an Evernote Pro upgrade.

But for many, that's not enough. The Mac App Store works great for selling the first version of an app, but after that, there's no way to sell an upgrade version without releasing it for free, or releasing it as a new app. That takes away the old upgrade incentive of being able to pay less to upgrade to the new version. There's no way for developers to cross-promote their own apps, either, or offer discounts to students and others as they might have in their own online stores.

So what do you think Apple still needs to change about the Mac App Store? And are you excited about the new automatic app updates and subscription options in Mavericks? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

It’s so easy to get your Mac cluttered with duplicate files, ones you’d likely overlook or never even know existed when you need to free up space on your Mac. That’s why you need MacPaw’s beautiful duplicate file remover Gemini, our sponsor this week.

Gemini scans your entire Mac — including your iTunes and iPhoto libraries, your download folders, and more — and finds all of your duplicate files. It then makes it simple to select the files you want to remove with the brand-new selection toolbar that lets you choose to remove the newest or oldest copies, and lets you select multiple duplicates at once for removal. You can even make it work just like you want, by setting file extensions and folders to ignore, so it’ll only find the duplicates you want to remove. It’s simple and fast, and makes it as easy as possible to get rid of the duplicates on your Mac.

We loved Gemini when we reviewed it last year, but since then it’s gotten even better. The latest version will also scan your Mail downloads folder, somewhere most of us wouldn’t think to check for duplicate files. It also makes it easier to remove multiple pairs of duplicates at once, can identify empty folders, and includes a brand-new tutorial that’ll help you get the most out of it. It’s the app you need to get rid of your duplicate files.

We just closed our giveaway; congrats to our winners Yurgengoa, Taylor, and Andrew!

There’s so many music streaming services, but good old fashioned radio is still one of the best ways to listen to music online. It’s free, curated by professionals, and isn’t locked down to specific countries as most online music services are. That’s why Radium 3 is one of my favorite tiny Mac apps. It lets me listen to internet radio right from my Mac’s menubar while I’m working, and makes it easy to discover new stations and songs.

We gave Radium 3 a high rating in our review, and continues to be the way I and many others on our team listen to internet radio. It’s gotten even better since its release, and now includes higher resolution album art and options to buy songs on Amazon in addition to iTunes. Combine that with its catalog of over 6,000 radio stations, AirPlay support, the Smart Equalizer, and a wish list of the songs you’ve heard and want to buy, and you couldn’t ask for a better Mac radio player.

Radium 3 usually costs $9.99 on the App Store, but we’ve got 3 codes to giveaway to our readers. If you don’t have Radium 3 yet, here’s your chance to get your own copy for free. Just comment below and let us know why you’d love to have a copy of Radium 3 to enter the giveaway. Then, share this page on your favorite social network and comment again with a link to your post for a bonus entry.

Hurry and get your entry in; our giveaway is closing on Monday, July 15th!

Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.

We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from June for sponsoring our site and for the great apps they make. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.

If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!

Your email app is one of the most important apps on your Mac, since email is likely the main way you communicate and collaborate with your colleagues. But all email apps aren’t created equal, and while there’s many out there, they all don’t include the features you need. Postbox 3 is the email app you need to try if you haven’t found one to fit your needs yet. It’s got tight Gmail integration, conversation view with inline Quick Reply, Evernote and Dropbox integration, and more.

Need a quick way to watermark all of your photos to protect your copyright online? Look no further than Visual Watermark. It’s an easy-to-use professional watermarking app that incluedes over 10 integrated composite watermarks, 250 built-in fonts, an interactive Watermark Designer, and more. You’ll be able to design unique watermarks, preview how they look on your pictures, add it to all your pictures at once, then save it for future use, all in a modern UI that makes it straightforward to use.

Need to keep your Mac’s hard disks clean and working great? Nektony’s Utilities are what you need. They have ClearDisk to clean up your startup disk in few clicks, Disk Inspector to analyze your disk space with a beautiful interface that makes travelling through your hard drive spectacular and very effective, and their flagship app Disk Expert that can help you manage and sort through your files.

Even if you’re a genius, it’s impossible to remember everything possible about all the programming languages and libraries you need to know to build a successful app. Instead, you likely end up Googling answers as you go along, or have to dig though several different documentation sets in different apps at the same time. There’s no reason to waste time like that.

That’s why you need Dash, the must-have documentation app for the Mac. It’ll make your life easier by keeping all of the documentation you need right at your fingertips. Dash supports 80+ API documentation sets, ranging from Cocoa and Android to HTML and CSS, so regardless of what language or framework you’re using, Dash has you covered.

And a special thanks to you, our Mac.AppStorm.net readers, for reading and sharing our articles. We couldn’t do it without you!

You got Photoshop or Pixelmator or Acorn to create. A Dropbox or Droplr account to share. Email or FTP to send off your creations. But you got a Dribbble account to show off.

That’s not bad — we all want to show off our best work, after all. But really, Dribbble is the place we go when we’ve whipped up some beautiful pixels and want to show them off and let everyone ooh and ahh over them. And what matters most is that people see what we designed, like it, comment on it, or even rebound it with their own design ideas.

And so, for the seriously Dribbbler, LastShot is the app you need to track all the stats on your latest shot.

We’ve all accidentally deleted an important file — or forgotten to save a file after typing up a whole page worth of changes. The latter problem is fixed with Autosave in most modern Mac apps, and the former is usually fixable if you have a Time Machine backup setup or if the deleted file was in Dropbox (where you can undelete files or roll back changes to them for up to 30 days for free, from their site).

But what if you manage to delete a file that wasn’t backed up? Or — even worse — what if you wipe your whole backup disk without meaning to? You’re going to need a disk recovery tool, one that can undelete files. I just had this happen to my personal backup disk, and after recovering from my initial panic, took Disk Drill for a spin to see how much it could get back. This time, I wasn’t just testing an app for a review: I honestly needed the app to work.

The good news: it worked, most of the way. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of disk recovery, and how to get the most of your data back if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

In the world of browsers, fortunes can change terribly fast. If you browsed at all in the '90's, you surely used Netscape, at least for a time. Then IE 6 was the only game in town, while the cool kids started switching to Firefox. Apple's Safari came along, and while it didn't seem as important at first, it became the #1 way people browse from phones and tablets thanks to iOS. And Chrome, built on Safari's Webkit foundation, became the most popular browser. IE still has enormous marketshare, but it lost the mindshare long ago.

All along, in the background, Opera has been the alternate browser that everyone forgot about. It's 15th version just got released — now powered by Chrome's fork of Webkit, of all things — but it's still little more than a blip on web browsing statistics. It's had mobile versions for longer than iOS and Android have been around — I originally used it on a Nokia Symbian device, and later used it on a Windows Mobile 5.1 phone, far before the iPhone was around, much less had native apps.

And yet, it's never become a popular browser. But with Opera 15, more developers like Evernote are making browser extensions for it, and it could just possibly become a more popular browser — but the odds are against it.

That's why we're wondering if you use Opera, or if you used it in the past. We'd love to hear your thoughts about the European browser that won't quit in the comments below.

Ever wished our giveaways let you pick the app you won? Well, this week, we’ve got a giveaway that’ll let you do just that — actually, it’ll let you pick the ten apps you win!

Our friends at Paddle our running their second Pick a Bundle Mac from now until July 14th, and it’s a great way to get a huge discount on a number of great Mac apps. You can pick any 10 apps you want from the included selection of 30 apps for just $49.99. And this Pick a Bundle includes a ton of apps you’ll love, including apps we’ve covered before like ExpanDrive, On the Job, TotalFinder, TotalSpaces, DEVONthink‘s DEVONnote and DEVONsphere, Popchar X, Typinator, and 28 more apps!

But you might just be able to get all of that for free, since we’ve got 3 copies of the bundle to giveaway to our readers this week! This giveaway will take a bit of extra work to enter, but it’s worth it. Here’s what you need to do: sign up for the Pick a Bundle newsletter at http://promo.paddle.com, then comment below with the 10 apps you’d pick if you won the bundle, and finally share this post on Twitter or Facebook and add the link to your post in the comment below. We’ll then pick 3 random winners from the entries!

Hurry and get your entry in: we’re closing the giveaway on July 10th!

Best of all, any competition winners whom have already bought the bundle will be refunded in full for their purchase, so your bundle will be completely free if you win even if you go ahead and buy a copy of the Pick a Bundle before we close the giveaway!

Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.

Storage space is at a premium these days, with SSDs coming standard in MacBook Airs and Retina MacBook Pros. SSDs are speedy and a huge improvement over platter hard drives in most ways, but it’s rare now to have a 500Gb or larger drive built into your Mac. Rather than having to buy a new Mac, or shuffle files between external drives, why not clean up the space that you have? That’s exactly what Detox my Mac, our sponsor this week, can help you do.

Detox My Mac is an advanced deep-clean app for your Mac running OS X 10.5 or newer. It simplifies the tools that you’d normally find in OS X’ disk utilities, and then gives you over 30 extra tools to clean up your Mac and keep it maintained. It’ll help you find and remove old cache files and logs, the extra files left behind when you uninstall apps, and more. You can clean up all of that and more in just 2 clicks with Detox my Mac.

It won’t magically make your Mac brand new, but it will clean out the old cobwebs from old apps and help you have the most space free for the stuff you really want on your Mac. So, if you’ve noticed that your Mac is running out of storage space, now’s the time to clean it up. There’s no reason for all of your SSD’s space to be wasted by junk files that you don’t need anyhow.

Get Your Mac Detoxed Today!

You can get started cleaning up your Mac for free with Detox My Mac basic. Then, for a limited time, you can get Detox my Mac Pro for just $17.95, 30% off its normal price as an exclusive special for AppStorm readers. Just head to http://www.detoxmymac.com/discount-code to get your discounted copy of Detox my Mac Pro this week!

If you’re still using Google Reader, there’s a weekend project that you’ve got to take on: exporting your RSS feeds, and finding a new RSS reader app. That’s because it’s the end of June already, and Google’s shutting down Google Reader on Monday!